Jim Crow, Ethnic Enclaves, and Status Attainment: Occupational Mobility among U.S. Blacks, 1880–1940

Ruef, Martin; Grigoryeva, Angelina

doi:10.1086/701020

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 61 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Some later may have experienced downward mobility or changes in occupations in their forties and fifties as they lived through World War I, the Great Depression, and the influx of low-skilled immigrants from Europe as well as the mass internal labor market movement caused by the Great Migration. However, our data do not allow us to trace these life cycle changes in mobility because most sons were observed in their thirties in our intergenerational sample (33,34). After a long and stable trend between the 1900 and 1960 cohorts, estimated rank-rank correlations rose for the most recent cohorts, suggesting a declining turn in social mobility.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Song

Massey

Rolf

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population—the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents—increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Song

Massey

Rolf

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Rather, we believe that the entrepreneurs who made a positive move are entrepreneurs who had a strong core to the initial network with which they launched their business (cf. Ruef & Grigoryeva, 2017, on ethnic entrepreneurship more likely in neighborhoods containing only a few people of the entrepreneur's ethnicity). These entrepreneurs had two or more mutually supportive contacts in their core network, one helpful at founding and the other helpful with the first significant event.…”

Section: Business Success Brokerage and Event Contactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Network Events in the Later Success of Chinese Entrepreneurs

Burt

Opper²

2017

Manag. Organ. Rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We trace the social networks around Chinese entrepreneurs back to their firm's founding to learn about the role early events play in the later success of a business. We use name generator questions paired with career history questions to identify 'event contacts' missed by the usual focus on current business. We draw four conclusions from interviews with a large, stratified random sample of entrepreneurs: (1) Relations with event contacts stand out for guanxi qualities of high trust relatively independent of the surrounding network structure, and are critical to distinguishing more successful entrepreneurs from the less successful. (2) The substance of a significant event matters less than the fact that the entrepreneur deems it significant. (3) When family is turned to for support it is most likely at founding, but family is not the usual source of support at founding. Rather, entrepreneurs turn to people they have known for many years, typically people beyond the entrepreneur's family. (4) The transition from founding to first significant event stands out as distinctly consequential for later success. Entrepreneurs who turn for help on their first significant event to a person separate from, but especially close to, the founding contact are more successful in their business development. That early move is not visible in the later network around the entrepreneur.

show abstract

“…These effects are true even when comparing White and Black children who grow up in the same neighborhoods. These findings have been consistent for later cohorts, especially among Black Americans who live in highly segregated contexts (Hout 1984;Ruef and Grigoryeva 2018). Recent work by Chetty and Hendren (2018b) find that Black Americans have lower rates of intergenerational mobility than other racial or ethnic groups.…”

Section: The Spatial Concentration Of Immobilitymentioning

confidence: 56%

Moving Out to Move Up: Higher Education as a Mobility Pathway in the Rural South

Parsons

2022

rsf

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

fieldwork in rural Mississippi, including participant observation in education institutions and interviews with students and their families, this article explores the experiences of a cohort of high school students to highlight the ways in which education is not a magic bullet, even for students who have already opted into the idea of higher education as a path to a better life. Such students face significant barriers in their path to college and beyond. These barriers highlight important deficiencies in the reliance on higher education as the predominate pathway out of poverty. By opportunity Moving Out to Move Up: Higher Education as a Mobility Pathway in the Rural South rya n pa rSonSMobility has become more constrained, and patterns of immobility are spatially concentrated in certain parts of the United States. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mississippi, this article examines the role of college as a pathway out of this entrenched poverty and the social and structural barriers that limit the potential of higher education for poor students. It argues that for rural youth, especially rural youth of color, enrolling in college and finding employment that uses that education requires a permanent transition from one opportunity structure to another, a transition that is not often expected of students from more privileged backgrounds. This transition creates social, psychological, and cultural barriers that limit students' ability to be mobile through education.

show abstract

Jim Crow, Ethnic Enclaves, and Status Attainment: Occupational Mobility among U.S. Blacks, 1880–1940

Cited by 16 publications

References 61 publications

Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Early Network Events in the Later Success of Chinese Entrepreneurs

Moving Out to Move Up: Higher Education as a Mobility Pathway in the Rural South

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About